China’s New Morning Star Friends and other Fellow Travellers.
Morning Star platforms ‘Marxist-Leninist’ defence of Chinese Regime.
“Perhaps China’s current ability to tolerate paradoxes is the most notable legacy of Mao – that dedicated admirer of contradictions.” (P 465) “An adaptive ‘guerrilla-style’ mode of policymaking”, “”Maybe that is why China, for the time being, can be ruled by a party that continues to emphasise its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist heritage, whole proclaiming the necessity of market forces; that proclaims its possession of a ‘comprehensive plan’ at a time when China is more complicatedly diverse than at any point in is history. Maybe this explains also why I has a leader who has revived Maoist strategies fifty years after his family were torn apart by Mao’s policies.”(P 465)
Maoism: A Global History. Julia Lovell. 2019.
The one-time pro-Soviet Communist Party of Britain has taken to admiring the Chinese Communist Party.
Quotes from Mao festoon party members’ tweets, the CPB has taken to calling itself ‘Marxist-Leninist'(an old orthodox Official Communist tag, but one these days largely confined to the remaining fragments of Maoism) and they have produced this:
It seems as if the CPB, lacking the Beacon of the USSR, has, in desperation, found a new Socialist Fifth of the World.
Enter the latest sally.
Xinjiang: staying afloat in a wave of disinformation
Kate Woolford, a member of the Southampton Young Communist League and social media editor of Challenge (The YCL journal) writes.
“The latest red scare propaganda targets China and its autonomous region of Xinjiang. Many people will have seen statistics that refer to “one million Muslims” being held in concentration camps and various other human rights abuses — even “genocide.” It is crucial that the public are aware of where the main allegations come from and gain a picture of what is really going on in Xinjiang.”
Scales no doubt fall from our eyes when, after a farrago of ad hominem attacks on small number of reports abut the persecution of this minority we come to,
According to CGTN, “From 1990 to 2016, thousands of terrorist attacks have been launched in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers.”
In response, China has launched campaigns to crack down on violent extremism, separatism and terrorism with a focus on re-education. The camps were built to de-radicalise Muslims who had been victims of Etim’s ideas — this is the point of the mass mobilisation in the region that has led to false allegations of “genocide,” “forced sterilisation” and “torture.”
In the spirit of fairness, after having rubbished any report of bad treatment of China’s Uighur minority China expert Kate Wolford cites the Chinese state’s own line:
“the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China puts the state’s case forward plainly.”
“Faced with this severe and complex problem [religious extremism], Xinjiang has upheld the principle of addressing both the symptoms and the root causes in the fight against terrorism and extremism, by striking hard at serious terrorist crimes, which are limited in number and by educating and rehabilitating people influenced by religious extremism and involved in minor violations of the law.
“In accordance with the law, it has established a group of vocational education centres to offer systemic education and training in response to a set of urgent needs: to curb frequent terrorist incidents, to eradicate the breeding ground for religious extremism, to help trainees acquire a better education and vocational skills, find employment and increase their incomes and most of all, to safeguard social stability and long-term peace in Xinjiang.”
At the camps residents are taught Mandarin — the lingua franca spoken by 73 percent of the Chinese population — taught technical skills in order to help them find work when they leave and offered mental guidance to overcome radicalised ways of thinking.
Of course, as is the case everywhere in the world, the severity of a sentence depends on the scale of the crime and the willingness of a person of acknowledge their guilt.
The people in the re-education centres are assessed on how much harm they have been caused, their willingness to receive training and whether they have already completed a prison sentence but might still require further rehabilitation.
The people in the centres are provided with free education and once the trainees reach their expected criteria, they are offered certificates of completion and can leave. Depending on the reason they are there, many are allowed to go home to visit their families once or twice a week.
It is absolutely not a campaign to stop them practising Islam — religious activities are protected by Article 36 of the constitution: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organisation or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion.
The lengthy piece ends with this:
“We cannot ignore the drive to war against China. Fear of speaking out against atrocity propaganda because of its upsetting and controversial nature will only lead to the manufacturing of consent for war. Western intervention led to two million people dying in Korea, 2.4 million people dying in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, three million people dying in Vietnam among millions more elsewhere.
Given the history, given the body count, socialists have a duty to vehemently oppose the idea that our countries should be able to interfere in others; denouncing the false narrative on Xinjiang is now part of that duty.”
This is how the Chinese state has reacted to reporting on the issue;
BBC journalist leaves China after Beijing criticises Uighurs coverage
John Sudworth’s relocation to Taiwan comes after ‘months of personal attacks’ over reporting of alleged abuses of minorities
Here is some more History.
. “From October 1050 to October 1951, the regime eliminated somewhere between 1,5 and 2 million people. (P 24) this time, death sentences were fewer, formal executions many suspects killed themselves. “The objective was to produce a docile population by transforming almost every act and every utterance into a potential crime.”(P 241)
The Cultural Revolution A People’s History, 1962—1976 Frank Dikötter 2016.
Here are some more Fellow Travellers: John Ross, former leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG),
The main theme of the fellow Travellers of Chinese Communist Party is that its development of the productive forces in the country is a miracle. The lack of democracy, human rights, is less important that “this extraordinary successful political project”. The regime has “extraordinarily” increased the ‘real’ freedoms of the population. Happiness is the CCP.. (Martin Jacques).
Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, was famously the betist of bêtes noires of the Communist Party of Britain. Speculation is growing that he will be invited back to their pages.
Left Internationalists do not agree:
Update: there is also this,
‘FIND OUT THE FACTS ON THE UYGHURS’
The Communist Party of Britain is urging labour movement bodies not to rush to judgment on the Uyghur question in China.
Mr Griffiths said the reports of ‘genocide’ from a network of right-wing institutes and pressure groups funded by the US, British and Australian governments are recycled uncritically in the Western media.
As one of many international delegations to visit Xinjiang, he had seen for himself that mosques are open, the Uyghur language can be seen and heard everywhere, and the majority of top state and political officials are Uyghurs, not Han Chinese.
Tendance Coatesy 
Check out Anna Chen (MadamMiaow) on Twitter. Wall to wall CCP propaganda. She used to be a SWP member and the STWC Press Officer before breaking with them. Now she has gone from the Third Camp into the Second.
Her old Party meanwhile is nominally “Neither Washington nor Beijing” but being incredibly eurocentric doesn’t really comment too much on the subject (to them The East is a mysterious place). Plus the milieu they operate in is pretty “Second Camp” and Anti West so they probably don’t want to piss them off too much. Tailoring itself to the particular group it seeks to recruit at any particular time has always been the SWP’s key to growth, or least survival.
IainF
April 14, 2021 at 5:28 pm
Anna, where to begin, where to end?
It is sad that she seems to think that those opposed to the regime are in some fashion opposed to the Chinese people and culture, that latter which had influenced us all and is greatly liked.
Andrew Coates
April 14, 2021 at 5:32 pm
Yes, being accused of “sinophobia” for opposing the CCP is an old trick while the many Chinese who are against the CCP are called “Bananas”. All fairly disgusting and used to close down debate.
IainF
April 14, 2021 at 6:18 pm
This is a good time to visit the gutenberg.org collection of books by Comrade Jack London, specifically “The Unparalleled Invasion” in a book titled “Only the Strong.” The fate recommended for China by that Socialist orator goes a long way toward explaining events after 1910.
oiltranslator
April 15, 2021 at 5:31 pm
Communist Party of Britain (CPB) general secretary Robert Griffiths told the party’s political committee … that the charges of ‘genocide’ are ideologically motivated, lack independent evidence and form part of a ‘new cold war’ being waged against China.
“The committee urged labour movement organisations in Britain to send fact-finding missions to Xinjiang and other parts of China rather than repeat fictitious propaganda’.”
Presumably, such “fact-finding missions” will be along the lines of the closely supervised delegations to the USSR, organised by the British-Soviet Friendship Society and the World Peace Council, where delegates witnessed at first hand, happy Soviet workers dancing in the fields, singing patriotic songs and driving luxury cars.
It might also be noted that Comrade Griffiths appears to have avoided the simple question: is the charge of genocide true? An accusation might be “ideologically motivated”, but still be true. He claimed there is little “independent” evidence – but was he saying the claims are false?
Time and time again the CPB and the Morning Star skirt round the crucial question, relying upon innuendo and evasive formulations: they claim the evidence is entirely “based on reports by one person, Adrian Zenze” and simply refuse to acknowledge the evidence of eye witnesses like Gulbahar Haitiwaji, the aerial photographs of detentions camps and the footage of Uighars being loaded onto trains destined for those camps.
Jim Denham
April 14, 2021 at 9:34 pm
There is just so much evidence Jim in proper news outlets, across the world.
“The Uyghur genocide is the ongoing series of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government against the Uyghur people and other ethnic and religious minorities in and around the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the People’s Republic of China.[1][2][3] Since 2014,[4] the Chinese government, under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, has pursued policies leading to more than one million Muslims[5][6][7][8][9] (the majority of them Uyghurs) being held in secretive internment camps without any legal process[10][11] in what has become the largest-scale and most systematic detention of ethnic and religious minorities since the Holocaust.[12][13][14] Critics of the policy have described it as the sinicization of Xinjiang and have called it an ethnocide or cultural genocide,[21] while some governments, activists, independent NGOs, human rights experts, academics, government officials, and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile have called it a genocide.[26]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
“I was dead inside”: a Uighur survivor of re-education camps in China testifies.
Le Monde: January 2021:
https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2021/01/19/j-etais-morte-de-l-interieur-rescapee-des-camps-chinois-une-ouigoure-de-france-temoigne_6066730_3210.html
Defender a los uigures. El Pais.
https://elpais.com/opinion/2021-01-21/defender-a-los-uigures.html
Genocídio uigur: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoc%C3%ADdio_uigur
You could extend this for pages and pages.
So they are all wrong and the CCP and the Morning Star are right.
Andrew Coates
April 14, 2021 at 10:02 pm
“Ahhh, Russia. All them corn fields and ballet in the evening…………….”
David Walsh
April 14, 2021 at 11:49 pm
So “tolerate paradoxes” is now looter Newspeak for doublethink and reality control?
oiltranslator
April 15, 2021 at 5:23 pm
Letter in Morning Star (April 15):
Kate Woolford’s article defending China against “atrocity propaganda” was generally persuasive.
However she states that the UN has visited the camps in Xinjiang and found “no evidence of mass human rights abuses or genocide.”
I can find no reference to this visit anywhere online.
Can Kate Woolford or anyone else provide some references for this claim?
BRENDAN O’BRIEN, London N21
Jim Denham
April 16, 2021 at 8:47 am